


Contagion

by heartswells



Series: Repeat & Repair [2]
Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: (heavily edited repost after deleting the original), Anxiety, Communication Failure, Germophobia, M/M, Mysophobia, OCD, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, maladaptive coping skills, touch-aversion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-31
Updated: 2020-01-31
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:15:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22485448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartswells/pseuds/heartswells
Summary: That was the unbearable truth. Ryan was starved silent. He was so desperate to feign ignorance from his OCD and so desperate to try to gain the things that it wouldn’t allow him that he was willing to hurt both of them. He allowed his needs to fester, and thus Cale’s did as well.
Relationships: Ryan Graves/Cale Makar
Series: Repeat & Repair [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1618057
Comments: 2
Kudos: 23





	Contagion

**Author's Note:**

> this is a **repost** of a fic that I deleted. the ending had been heavily edited to better fit the pairing.

Cale slept with a closeness to Ryan that only lovers could achieve, winding himself around Ryan’s body like the vines of climbing roses. In the darkness, with their details indiscernible, they looked picturesque, like two poetic lovers reaching for one another in their dreams with the hope of becoming one. With light, it would be clear it was not a shared hope. Though Cale felt like he was blooming in the night, Ryan felt like he was being strangled.

Cale was like razor wire, his touch making Ryan shake with agony as it sliced him to the bone. Cale—as a being, as a concept—was bleeding all over Ryan’s body, soaking through his skin. He was infesting and infecting him like a parasite, a rash, a disease. This theoretical Cale that his disorder conjured was a toxin that corrupted and destroyed, and it was surrounding Ryan, claiming him, colonizing him, assaulting him.

Inside him was an uninterrupted scream, a relentless roar attempting to cloud his brain and lessen the terror he felt by exceeding the volume of his thoughts. 

Cale shifted in his sleep and heaved a sigh, murmuring the secrets of his dream against Ryan’s neck. The rush of breath cascaded over Ryan, and his skin seemed to curdle in revulsion. Cale’s breaths should be nothing but magnificent to him, the astonishing, beautiful evidence of the livelihood of his lover. It should overwhelm him with love and make him want to shout with glee, for to feel Cale’s breath was to share in his life. Instead, it nauseated him, made him want to take a razor and scrape the layers of flesh from his bones in the pursuit of purity. 

He pried himself from Cale’s arms and fled into the shower.

The water was scalding, and the pain made him shudder, but the burning felt purifying. He wished he could dip himself in fire and burn away the impurities, allowing it to devour him without consequence and incinerate the pieces of others that clung to him. He wished he could feel clean.

He wished he wasn’t this way at all. 

He was suspended in the belief and fear of something akin to the miasma. His mind screamed that the space people existed in, the fucking air people breathed became dirty and dangerous because people were inherrently infected with something, and he could not mentally bear to come into contact with it. This everything fucking around him needed to be avoided, but it couldn’t be because none of it was real! It was all imagined, and he felt that he therefore shouldn’t be able to fear it, but he could viscerally. And it made him reject who he loved most, forced Cale to love him empty-handed.

Cale was sitting on the edge of the bed when Ryan emerged from his shower. 

“You’re awake,” Ryan stated stupidly because he didn’t know what else to say, didn’t know how to acknowledge his own guilt. His body suddenly felt awkward, bulky and uncomfortable, as if he did not know how to wear it, and he shifted, self-conscious of just how much space he took up. 

“Ryan, you can tell me to go home, y’know,” Cale sighed, pushing his hand through his hair warily. He looked worn, sickly and hungover though he was neither. 

“Um, what?” 

“It’s okay if you aren’t comfortable with me being here, but you just have to tell me.” Cale sounded frustrated, and it fed Ryan’s own frustration.

“I can’t just tell you to leave,” Ryan said, words made harsh by the vehemence of his anxiety. 

“Why?” Cale asked incredulously. 

“How? How do I tell you not to touch me and expect you to stay?”

“By trusting me.” Cale said it like a plea, begging Ryan to help him to keep them both safe by enabling him to respect his boundaries. He had done nothing to make himself untrustworthy, and he had done everything to be compassionate, to learn, to understand, and to love. It felt so unfair—and he knew it was complicated, knew it was painful—but was he not deserving of trust?

“You don’t understand.”

“I don’t understand because you won’t allow me to, Ryan. You won’t talk to me about it. You know, this hurts me too. I’m the one having to bear the guilt of hurting you because you aren’t willing to be honest with me. This isn’t just about you.”

That was the unbearable truth. Ryan was starved silent. He was so desperate to feign ignorance from his OCD and so desperate to try to gain the things that it wouldn’t allow him that he was willing to hurt both of them. Rather than sanitize and stitch when Cale asked for his boundaries, Ryan lied, and he allowed things to become gangrenous and infectious. He allowed his needs to fester, and thus Cale’s did as well.

“Are you even listening?” Cale asked when he didn’t reply. He was frustrated, over-exhausted, and hurt. 

Ryan was recoiling deep into the depths of his body, hiding in the cavern of his chest, removing himself from the fullness of his form. His thoughts could not be completed; they were jumbled, rushed, and blurred, a panicked cacophony of meaningless syllables. The only thing that he could could experience was the need to wash his bedsheets. That need possessed him fully, raging inside him with the all-encompassing power and visceral sensation of an _emotion_.

Cale sighed. 

“Look, we’ll talk tomorrow. Okay?”

“Yeah,” Ryan placated. He just needed Cale to leave. He needed to change his sheets, needed to regain safety though cleanliness, needed to physically wash away his anxiety—and that was the problem. It wasn’t possible for any of the solutions he coveted to ever resolve a single problem. Clean sheets wouldn’t make Cale forgive him; they wouldn’t give him the strength to confront his problems; they wouldn’t teach him how to trust or communicate. 

But it was the only way that he knew how to cope.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> [moey](%E2%80%9Dgreecedlightning.tumblr.com%E2%80%9D) has shone a light of hope in all of this for me, and eventually, i will write a happier fic where cale and ryan learn how to manage ryan’s symptoms and be intimate in a way that keeps both of them safe. i realize that all of my ocd fics thus far are fraught with angst. i don’t wish to perpetrate the idea that this disorder is hopeless and we are all damned. we can be okay. please stay safe.


End file.
